The Boroughs Review: Netflix’s Best New Sci-Fi Show

Netflix’s The Boroughs opens with a scene that tells you exactly what kind of show you’re in for. Genre legend Dee Wallace — best known as Elliot’s mom in E.T. — goes through her quiet nightly routine at an upscale desert retirement community, and then something with too many legs comes for her. Before you’ve even settled in, the tone is set: this is warm, funny, frightening, and smarter than it has any right to be.

The series, which drops all eight episodes on Thursday, is executive produced by Matt and Ross Duffer — the Stranger Things creators — but written and showrun by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, the Emmy-winning duo behind The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. The Spielberg comparisons are unavoidable and entirely intentional — this is a love letter to Amblin sci-fi, Stephen King, and the kind of genre storytelling that makes you feel something while something horrible is eating people. The twist is that instead of a gang of kids on bikes, the heroes are all in their 70s.

Alfred Molina plays Sam Cooper, a recently widowed aerospace engineer who moves into The Boroughs — a too-perfect, retro-futuristic retirement community in the New Mexico desert — because his late wife Lily (Jane Kaczmarek, luminous in flashbacks) had signed the contract before her death. Sam had no say in the matter. He despises the place on sight. He’s described by one critic as “Carl from Pixar’s Up come to life,” and that’s not far off: the grief is real, the rage is palpable, and Molina plays it with the kind of layered restraint that makes you feel every inch of his isolation.

“My wife’s dead,” Sam tells his neighbor Jack early on. “And the world just keeps on turning, and people just keep living their lives. They shop and they laugh and they eat. And they go to sleep, and they get up, and they do it all over again. And I hate ’em for it.” It’s a gut-punch of a line, and Molina delivers it like he means every word.

Sam doesn’t stay isolated for long. Bill Pullman‘s Jack — a gregarious, laid-back neighbor who’s keenly aware that single men are a rare commodity at The Boroughs — drags him to a welcome barbecue, and that’s where the ensemble assembles. Geena Davis plays Renee, a former music manager with a convertible and a go-get-’em energy that earns her the show’s best line: “The gray rebellion rises, such as it is.” Alfre Woodard is Judy, a retired journalist the show lovingly dubs a “chatty Nancy Drew.” The Wire‘s Clarke Peters plays her husband Art, a philosophical stoner who tends to hallucinogens in the desert and has a therapeutic relationship with a crow. And American Horror Story alum Denis O’Hare is Wally, a doctor who was on the front lines of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, is now dying of stage-four prostate cancer, and somehow remains the funniest person in any room. His line about death — that it’s “the real monster. Everything else is shadows” — lands with the weight of someone who has earned the right to say it.

The welcome barbecue scene, directed by Ben Taylor in the premiere, is being called by Hollywood Reporter the single most delightful scene the show has to offer — the whole crew gossiping about neighbors, ribbing each other about their respective “body counts” (the sex kind, not the death kind), trading their gnarliest medical anecdotes. It’s a blast. And then later that same night, Sam is woken by strange noises and discovers a giant spider-legged monster with a taste for human fluids outside his house.

The Premise Is Familiar. The Cast Makes It Sing.

Nearly every critic has reached for the same shorthand — “Stranger Things with grandparents” — and it’s fair. The retirement community that’s too good to be true, the overlooked group of misfits who can see what others can’t, the institutional conspiracy hiding something monstrous: these are well-worn genre moves. The series even opens in the New Mexico desert without ever once uttering the word “Roswell,” which feels deliberately, cheekily restrained. The community itself, with its pastel homes, a hard-wired in-home communication device called Seraphim (think 2001‘s HAL, but cheerier), and management that talks to residents in a patronizing, childlike manner, has the cultish, Stepford quality of a place that has something to hide.

The show’s creators have said openly that they chose elderly heroes precisely because older people are dismissed and ignored in the same way children are — which makes them, counterintuitively, the perfect protagonists for this kind of story. The Boroughs community even has “The Manor,” a long-term care facility where residents who report seeing strange things tend to end up. Anyone who talks about creatures gets institutionalized. It’s a horror premise that doubles as a pretty pointed commentary on how society treats the elderly, and the show wears it lightly enough that it doesn’t feel like a lecture.

Each member of the gang brings a specific skill to the mission — Sam the engineer, Wally the doctor, Judy the journalist, Renee the connected former industry player — and the Avengers-style assembly is part of the fun. Ed Begley Jr. appears as Edward, an Alzheimer’s-suffering resident in The Manor whose ramblings about “a creature in the walls” turn out to be anything but delusional. Seth Numrich plays Blaine Shaw, the community’s CEO, whose face is as smooth as his manners and whose motives are exactly as sinister as they appear. Alice Kremelberg plays his wife Anneliese — and notably, Numrich and Kremelberg previously appeared together in The Sinner Season 4, a reunion that fans of that show will clock immediately.

The conspiracy involves secret tunnels, underground caves, mysterious thefts of anything containing quartz, mass bird deaths, a tree bearing glittering orange fruit, and creatures that leave shiny blue blood droplets when shot. The show keeps most of the graphic horror off-camera, which is the right call — the suggestion is more unsettling than the spectacle, and it keeps the tone from tipping into relentless darkness.

Composer John Paesano’s score draws on 1980s orchestral cinema — think the emotional sweep of early Spielberg — and multiple reviewers have singled it out as something worth seeking out on its own. The soundtrack choices are equally deliberate, with songs selected to reflect each character’s era, and Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” playing a significant role in Sam’s emotional arc.

Where Critics Land

The consensus is warm, with most reviewers landing between 4 and 4.5 out of 5. The performances are the runaway highlight everywhere you look. O’Hare in particular is getting attention across the board — his Wally provides genuine comedy without ever deflating the horror stakes. One review describes him preparing for a mission by packing a tote bag containing granola bars and a meat cleaver, and watching a YouTube tutorial to pick a lock at a funeral parlor. That’s the show in a nutshell.

Where critics diverge is on the mystery itself. Hollywood Reporter’s review is the most measured of the bunch, arguing that the show’s greatest flaw is spending too much time on the sci-fi plot at the expense of the ensemble chemistry that makes it special — that after the barbecue scene in episode one, the show scatters its characters to separate storylines before bringing them back together, and something is lost in the gap. The Boston Globe is similarly reserved, calling it “a copy of a copy” and suggesting the nostalgia is so layered — Spielberg evoking Stranger Things evoking Stranger Things evoking Spielberg again — that the show occasionally feels like it’s running on borrowed warmth.

But even the less enthusiastic reviews agree that the cast alone justifies the watch. Collider puts it well: “If Sam, Wally, Renee, Art, and Judy can remain perceptive, brave, and capable in a world that has already written them off, then aging itself becomes less frightening.”

The show is also lighter in tone than Stranger Things got by its final seasons, which works in its favor. It never pretends the stakes aren’t real, but it doesn’t wallow either. At its best — and it is frequently at its best — The Boroughs is the kind of show that makes you laugh, then makes you feel something ache, then puts a monster on screen before you’ve had time to recover.

The whole season is available to stream now on Netflix. The cast walked the red carpet at The Egyptian Theatre Hollywood on May 18 ahead of the premiere. All eight episodes drop Thursday, May 21.

“Death is the real monster,” Wally says. “Everything else is shadows.” With a cast this good bringing lines like that to life, the shadows are very much worth sitting with.